Heroes aren’t born, they’re made. But the story of Aaron Hernandez, an unnaturally talented professional football player whose championship-winning legacy was tainted by two separate murder cases – one a double homicide – proves that monsters can be made too. At least, that’s what the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s true crime anthology, American Sports Story, argues.
The 10-episode FX series chronicles Hernandez’s rise to infamy, from high school standout to collegiate superstar to starting tight end for the New England Patriots during the height of the Tom Brady / Bill Belichick era. For every win on the field, there’s a stumbling block off: early concussions that contributed to a neurodegenerative disease the real Hernandez was posthumously diagnosed with, an abusive father, a culture of homophobia that forced him to remain closeted, drug use, toxic family ties, and a system that failed to hold athletes accountable at both the university and professional level. Tackling just one element of the tragedy that was Aaron Hernandez, who died by suicide at just 27 years-old, is a test of an actor’s ability, but Josh Rivera is tasked with covering such an expansive part of Hernandez’s descent.
In conversation, Rivera has an easy charm about him. He’s contemplative and thoughtful when speaking about Hernandez’s troubles, and the victims who suffered because of his poor decisions. But he’s just as quick to joke about his own experience on the gridiron – he played high school ball before changing course to theater – and his surprisingly normal private life, one far removed from the one Aaron Hernandez led.
We spoke with Rivera about his intense transformation for the role, his earnest appeal to football fans who might be watching, and how he leaves weightier work like American Sports Story behind with some help from D&D.
What intimidated you most about saying ‘yes’ to this show?
First of all, everybody knows about it. It’s something that a lot of people already have an opinion about. It’s something that a lot of people were following closely. And then, this is a nonfiction person. This is a real person who left behind real victims and real tragedy in his wake. I don’t personally love being in the center of controversy. I’m pretty quiet on social media. I don’t really make big statements. I like my little quiet, private life. So that sort of makes me a little bit nervous, in terms of what that does. I feel like even just saying yes to something like this is taking some kind of stance. I wanted to be really sensitive and I wanted to do right by the people that were left behind. And I just tried to do my best with the resources that I was given and acted as honestly as I could.
If everyone already knows this story, what did you intend for the show and your performance to add to it?
Something I’ve been bringing up that I think is important to keep in mind is, all of this is possible because of our consumerism. On a societal level, there is some share of culpability that we have in enabling things like these. Because a person wouldn’t be able to get away with anything if not for our need for content and entertainment, and the desire to see people that we like win, because that makes money and we give money to people who keep winning, regardless. I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind while watching the show.
Hernandez never publicly shared his sexual orientation, but the show dives into that facet of who he was and how repressing that part of himself may have affected him. How did you make sure you treated those scenes sensitively?
Fortunately, very early on, we addressed that. We were working with a queer-friendly association, GLAAD, that was helping us with the kinds of pitfalls to avoid in terms of telling a story like this. And something that we were trying to avoid is the connection between not being out of the closet and being really frustrated and mad all the time, being violent. Because the reality is that there were so many layers that made this a ticking time bomb. And that’s without including the CTE of it all, which was, I’m sure, a propelling factor.
But it’s important to include it because it’s a big part of his formative years; that he felt like he didn’t belong. He felt like there were really big pieces of himself that he had to hide from others, which I think added to his isolation and those sorts of qualities that he eventually developed.
I’m thinking of the locker room scenes specifically when I ask this next question: Do you think football fans might be surprised by the atmosphere, the environment of the NFL?
I think that there’s a Venn diagram in terms of sexual fluidity and locker room behavior with the fellas. If somebody who was not on the team or was an outsider walked into a locker room during a game celebration or something, they might raise an eyebrow or two. And I wonder how many people are going to recognize that as far as their experiences go. It can be a real pillar of guy humor, at times, and there’s something really interesting, psychologically, about that. There’s something there. It’s a strange niche, cultural thing that hyper-macho men have developed with one another that I find very interesting.
So much of this show is heavy, how do you separate yourself from it at the end of the day? Really, I just want to know what a Dungeons and Dragons jam session is.
[laughs] Where did you hear that?
I read it on the internet of course.
[still laughing] Okay, so my D&D friends are five of my really close friends from high school. We still keep in touch. They are all musicians, and I would sing with them every so often. And now when we all get together, everybody will get on their instrument and they will just do whatever beat that comes to their head, and I’ll sing something, and I’ll just make it up. And we’ll make up these songs. So it wasn’t specifically a jam session about D&D. But it’s a jam session with people that I play D&D with.
So you’re not soundtracking your adventures.
We have made some great songs about our D&D sessions, yeah. There’s a character that we wrote a song about. His name is Gravy Jones, and it’s just very absurd and ridiculous stuff.
Where’s the album?
You know what? I always had dreams of being a pop star and all that stuff. I would learn how to moonwalk, and I would moonwalk on stage. I would have liked to get really good at audio engineering, because now that’s the kind of thing that I find really interesting.
[In school] I wanted to learn how to be a producer and produce my own music and perform it. And now I feel a little bit more vulnerable with that. My voice feels so personal to me now, that it’s actually harder for me to sing in public than it used to be. I have to have some level of irony or else I get really embarrassed, which is kind of strange. I’ve got to figure that out, because I would eventually like to do something with music. It is very important to me. But yeah, I guess I would’ve just written music and either sold it or sang it myself and written it for my friends. And maybe I would’ve done a comedy band, too, on the side, and we’d have a name.
Me and my D&D buddies, we performed at each other’s weddings. I think the last time our band name was M. Night Sing-Along, and we’d just do covers of wedding crowd-pleasers. It’s good stuff.
American Sports Story premiere Sept. 17th on FX.
